Black Churches Renew Focus On AIDS Fight

New Cases on Rise in D.C.

The meeting's participants were black ministers, and its subject was sex -- specifically how avoiding the topic has contributed to the AIDS crisis.

"You've got to talk about sex!" boomed the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, a renowned Harlem pastor who came to the District on Thursday to rouse dozens of local black ministers from across the denominational gamut on the subject of HIV and AIDS -- the largest such D.C. gathering that participants could remember. Washington has the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the nation, and the vast majority of them are black.

Ministers banged their fists on tables, and the windowless ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel felt like a Sunday morning in the pews, filled with "mm-hmms" and "well-wells." Butts cited the Gospel of Mark and Jesus's resurrection to urge District ministers to stop focusing on placing blame -- for gay sex, for intravenous drug use, for promiscuity -- and do what the Bible teaches: Save lives.

"Mommas won't visit their sons, fathers won't hug their daughters, preachers won't preach. You know it, and I know it," said Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City and chairman of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. "You can look at anything else that seems to be standing in your way, but love has got to be the motive, the only motive."

Organizers said Thursday's Clergy Leadership Summit on HIV-AIDS, with some 75 ministers from predominantly black District churches, marks a return of attention within the country's black churches to AIDS, a quarter-century after the epidemic became known. This return has been coming for several years nationally, with new organizations and conferences devoted to helping set aside doctrinal differences over subjects such as homosexuality and abstinence.

Locally, "the District has been far behind" but has woken up because of new data showing it has 12 times the national rate of new AIDS cases, many among women and children, said the Rev. Canon John T.W. Harmon of Trinity Episcopal Church, which convened the summit.

"The black church is more willing than it's ever been to deal with this," the Rev. Christine Y. Wiley of Covenant Baptist Church said in an interview. Her church sits in Ward 8, which Wiley said has the city's highest AIDS rates.

Although her church offers HIV testing every week and distributes condoms, Wiley noted that other ministers need to decide for themselves what they can do to educate and support people without compromising their doctrine.

"The way many churches have dealt with it is not helpful and not working. If you bash people from the pulpit and focus on sin, you aren't doing it like Jesus did," she said. "Jesus said, 'Just go and sin no more,' but he healed them first. This issue has been out here so long, and now people are realizing the church hasn't had a significant impact -- and it could."

The summit included ministers from a broader range than past AIDS-related clergy gatherings, said Sterling Tucker, the city's first elected D.C. Council chairman and lead organizer of the summit.

"The churches have never fully been on board," he said before the summit began. "But now you have Pentecostal ministers and other conservative ministers who wouldn't have been here before."

Although many of the District's black churches already have some sort of AIDS ministry -- Tucker estimated that "it's not a large number," but Wiley said she thought most do -- the summit's goal was to heighten the issue's profile, to get churches to devote more than just a volunteer layperson to the issue and to get pastors preaching about the need for testing and acceptance.

At the summit, Marsha Martin, director of AIDS-HIV programs for the D.C. Department of Health, announced that the city is about to launch an effort to get every resident ages 14 to 84 tested by the end of the year.

D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), who chairs the council's Committee on Health, told the summit that the city is to blame for leaving its HIV-AIDS office "in a state of collapse." A year ago, he said, the office could not even pay its bills. Under Martin, he said, that problem has been resolved.

Butts triggered a round of loud laughs and mm-hmms when he talked about the very natural reason for discussing AIDS and sex from the pulpit: It's all God-made, he said. "There has to be sex in Heaven -- it wouldn't be Heaven without it!"

He then warned about judging other people's behavior differently from one's own. Referring to calls for abstinence, he said, "I'm saying to do what I did not do myself when I was a young man."

It seemed clear, however, that even with some new consensus, the road ahead will not be without controversy as issues such as gay sex and drug use continue to flare. Butts drew loud applause when he said no one will dictate to black church leaders what they should do in resisting "the devil's plan."

"The church must never compromise its reasons why" it fights HIV-AIDS, he said. "The reality is, as much as we might pray to have that table moved to the other side of the room, it's going to stay right there unless we do something about it."